Are you referring to the long white mural? It was sorta interactive. In RL they had postits to amend and add to the mural things they thought were missing. In SL we had post its as well, though the use of them was lost on me, too confusing.

yes interaction between both RL and SL was a big topic amongst us in SL, since for the most part, we were just observers in the conference, no participants.

True dat! Today at the conference was especially excruciating for the second life attendees. I'll admit, we paid nothing so we're only out our time, but I'd be hesitant to do that event in Second Life again. It was more of an after thought than anything else. We weren't included in the polls/surveys through out the day. They had break outs that we weren't set up for so the Second Life crew had to sit in on the break out that happened to be in the same room. About 5 minutes, maybe 10, into that breakout the Audio went out.

There was only 1 person spanning both worlds, and he signed out of SL when the break outs started so we had no way to provide feedback to the organizers, who sadly seemed more into tooting their horns at pulling off an event, than finding out how to make it better :(

Ah well. I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with. I can tell you there's definitely an interest. I think yesterday there were more SL attendees than RL (Real Life).

It is a challenge to digitally reproduce the value of running into somebody in the hallway and spawning an impromptu conversation. We can never reproduce that same dynamic because it involves too many human senses that don't transmit through the Internet. But we can do a lot with technology to help live attendees connect with each other.

With our Location Chat feature, you can see a list of attendees who are in the same location as you (such as at a specific exhibitor's booth, or in the lounge, or in the resource center). Since our shows usually include hundreds of people that are in the same place at the same time, it's a nice way to break down the attendees into natural groups.

We also enhance your abilities to organize everything you find at a virtual show. From documents to presentations to contacts, you can add anything you encounter to your virtual briefcase. Your briefcase remains persistent forever after the show, so you can always come back to follow up.

So my conclusion is that there will never be a virtual show that is 100% the same as a physical show. There are opportunities in a digital world that you don't have physically, and vice versa. And we've really only just begun. ON24 Labs is experimenting with many more opportunities that only exist virtually. If you consider that social networking tools like Twitter and LinkedIn really have no physical counterpart, you can start to see the technical and business future of the Virtual Show.